What This Is

Bold Efforts is a body of work exploring work, life, and decision-making, written from the perspective of a founder building and learning in real time. Much of this thinking currently takes the form of written essays, focused on ideas that stay useful even as tools, roles, and industries change.

The writing here is not about reacting to news, trends, or short-term shifts. It focuses on ideas that stay useful even as technology changes, industries evolve, and familiar ways of working are questioned.

This is a space for thinking slowly and clearly about things that matter over the long run.

How the Essays Think

Most essays on Bold Efforts treat work as a system. Careers, companies, incentives, tools, culture, ambition, and personal trade-offs are deeply connected. You can’t change one without affecting the others.

Rather than offering quick advice or surface-level takes, the essays try to understand how these pieces interact, where tensions arise, and what those tensions reveal. The goal is not certainty or prediction, but better judgment.

Many of the questions explored here aren’t new. What’s changed is the pace of change, the uncertainty, and the number of possible paths. These essays are an attempt to think clearly in the middle of that.

Who is the Author

I’m Kartik, the founder of Polynomial Studio, a product studio building technology businesses focused on how we work and live.

Over the past several years, I’ve worked across real estate, technology, startups, and corporate strategy, often at moments of transition and change. Bold Efforts is where I step back from execution and write to understand what I’m seeing, building, and learning.

Bold Efforts is not a side project or a content experiment. It’s a way to sharpen thinking, question assumptions, and make sense of decisions before and after they’re made. If you’re curious about my background and current work, you can find more details here.

Polynomial Studio and Fursa

Polynomial Studio is where many of these ideas are tested in practice. It’s a product studio building AI-driven businesses, including Fursa, a job discovery platform designed for a changing world of work.

The writing on Bold Efforts and the work at Polynomial Studio inform each other. Writing sharpens decisions. Building reveals flawed assumptions. That loop between thinking and doing is intentional.

If you’re interested in work that fits better into life, decisions that hold up over time, and ideas that go deeper than surface-level advice, you’ll likely find something here worth sitting with.